I think therefore IA?

Andrew Dillon, for the ASIST Bulletin, December/January 2001*

'Information architecture' (IA from now on) has rapidly become the first
ASIST hot button of the 21st century, seemingly launched upon us by the
mid-year summit 2000 in Boston (reported in previous issues of the Bulletin)
and fueled by a flood of discussion on the SIGIA listserv (details at: www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2000/Information_Architecture/listserv
.html). Now, in this, the first of a series of columns on IA that
I will write for the Bulletin, it is my pleasure to cover the emergence
and shaping of this topic in regular time.

Of course, like all 'new' topics, IA one has its own roots and longer-term
adherents, and many have not been shy about finding references to the
term in old books, or articulating their track-records and pedigrees as
'information architects' (IAs from now on). I mean, how new can IA be
when some people claim to have been doing it for over 20 years? While
definition of IA is at best fuzzy, ranging from the narrow view that it
is a web-specific profession, to the dismissive view of it as just another
name for library science, it is clear to me at least, that the IA label
excites many people. Furthermore, IA appears to provide some degree of
identity to people who struggled to see themselves as part of any distinct
group within the collective information design and analysis professions.

For me, the most important aspect of the Summit 2000 meet was the enthusiasm
people shared for the ideas. Having entered that meeting slightly dubious
of the IA concept, I left convinced that this was one label that meant
a lot to a lot of people. There were numerous testimonies from those who
claimed to have found a home with this group, practitioners and even academics
who were delighted to hear others' tales of identity crises and cross-disciplinary
work practices. Interest was piqued and desire given form at the summit,
and being there, it really felt like one was present at a historical event.
So far, so good!

However, a couple of residual doubts remain for me. First, while I accept
IA as a concept and even a meaningful description of a design process,
I need more convincing that any one person could be described accurately
as an Information Architect. Just as I value the process of user-centered
design, I would view with some cynicism a person who told me their profession
was 'user-centered designer'. So there are architectural properties in
information, of that I am sure, but are there any information architects?
Most people want to think so, and who could blame them? Information Architect
is a very sexy title, bound to impress one's friends and family, and certainly
a more lucrative professional title than web designer or librarian. But
I find it hard to shake my sense that information architecture currently
represents a collective process more accurately than it describes what
any individual does. Maybe that doesn't matter. After all, what is it
exactly that 'information scientists' do?

Second, I am wary of drawing boundaries between disciplines and skill
sets that so clearly overlap despite the job titles or formal qualifications
of the participants. In our attempts to define IA, both at the summit
and the subsequent online discussions, I heard and read many definitions
based on what IA was not, or what is was different from, rather than what
it truly was. What inclusionary definitions have been provided seem so
narrow to me as to become exclusionary. Can we really create a field whose
sole purpose is, as some suggested, to ensure adequate navigation of websites?
And even if we could, would it warrant the title 'architecture'? I don't
think so. As people spend more and more time in information spaces it
is clear to me that the architecture of such spaces will take on increased
importance. As such, I long to see a more inclusive definition of IA emerge
that incorporates a richer sense of the full user experience in information
space. As I have said before, how many users go to a web site just to
navigate through information space? Probably the same number of people
who visit buildings just to try out the elevators!

Among the birthpains of any discipline are the problems of definition
and scope, since people's search for something new precedes any firm knowledge
of the precise form it must take. But I am uncomfortable with raising
IA as some kind of all-conquering alternative to existing disciplines.
For me IA is best seen as an umbrella term under which we will find many
concerns shared with researchers who describe themselves as information
scientists, interaction designers, usability engineers and so forth (there's
those labels again!). We can add to this the methods and skills of journalists,
educators, market researchers, system analysts and many more who have
ideas and knowledge of what it takes to make information accessible, desirable
and consumable by people.

Exploring and resolving these issues will be important for the long-term
health of IA. An overly narrow focus might ease the burden of definition,
but it will likely only trivialize the concept over time and reduce it
to a label. Claiming to have launched a new field on such a definition
will garner attention initially but will only disenfranchise many others
whose work and approaches really are IA-relevant in a broader sense. To
limit IA to just the web (and only current conceptions of the web at that)
and even further, navigation and structure within such web environments,
seems a doomed strategy, excluding from our ranks many people whose concerns
with information design in the broader sense can only enrich the true
meaning of information architecture. More than this, the simple web-centric
view of IA blinds many to the existing knowledge we have gleaned about
interaction and information design from studying these issues elsewhere.

So where does this leave us? Well, the enthusiasm from May has been
sustained. The SIGIA group is official within ASIST, the listserv lives,
job ads now include the term IA in their descriptions and Kent State has
announced a new masters program in IA and Knowledge Management (see www.slis.kent.edu/programs/iakm.php3).
We even have a special issue of JASIS on IA planned. By all accounts,
this has been a pretty rapid development cycle. However, as we know only
too well from design studies, the final product often looks very different
from the early prototypes. We have established important requirements
for IA, performed some perfunctory stakeholder, user and task analysis,
and even seen initial designs floated. Now is the time for some testing
of ideas, and as we know only too well, testing invariably leads to re-design
and often the revisiting of original assumptions. Now it starts to get
really interesting.